Friday, May 27, 2011

Updike's unmodernist poetry

Updike, like Frost, Williams, Hardy and Larkin, never wrote a modernist poem. He too speaks in his own voice out of his own experience of the real, the given, the substantial world. Metaphors and other figures of speech, do not become symbols of spiritual things or meanings outside or unsupported by tangible connections with the real, the given, the substantial world. When Updike was growing up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, he felt no hankering to be another Rimbaud—or Wallace Stevens. He wanted to be a cartoonist.

He wrote his first poem when he was 21, and has this to say about it in the "Preface" to his Collected Poems 1953-1993: "The very first poem here, bearing a comically long title, yet conveyed, with a compression unprecedented in my brief writing career the mythogenetic truth of telephone wires and poles marching across a stretch of Pennsylvania farmland. I still remember the shudder, the triumphant sense of capture with which I got these lines down, not long after my twenty-first birthday."

Why the Telephone Wires Dipand the Poles are Cracked and Crooked

The old men say young men in gray hung this thread across our plains acres and acres ago.

But we, the enlightened, know in point of fact it's what remains of the flight of a marvellous crow no one saw: each pole a caw.

Here's another poem I like, written about thirty years later:

Pain

Pain flattens the world—its bubbles of bliss, its epiphanies, its upright sticks of day-to-day business— And shows us what seriousness is.

And shows us, too, how those around us cannot get in; they cannot share our being. Though men talk big and challenge silence with laughter

and women bring their engendering smiles and eyes of famous mercy, these kind things slide away like rain beating on a filthy window

when pain interposes. What children's pageant in gauze filled the skulls ballroom before the caped dark stranger commanded, Freeze? Life is worse than mere folly. We live within a cage wherefrom escape annihilates the captive; this, too, pain leads us to consider anew.

I could show you many more poems that would be worth your attention; I prefer tell you about certain qualities in Updike's poetry that I don't much care for. He has more to say about his sex life than I at least want to hear. And he likes to show us how much he knows about science—and how wittily he can write about such deep matters as entropy or the valence bonds that bind atoms in molecules. His poem about the moons of Jupiter is a tour de force; but that's all it is.

I don't understand why this poet makes so little use of rhyme—and the music of rhyme— in his 'serious' poetry. (You can feel the power of rhyme as you feel the power of "pain" as it "leads" us to reconsider our view of life in the poem I have just showed you.) Rhyme, he thinks, belongs in "light verse", which he carefully separates off from the good stuff in a special section at the end of the book. It's as if he were afraid of his own wit, afraid that his serious poetry might be contaminated by it. But wit is what makes his good poetry good; a little more music would have made it better. Remember what the Duke said: "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."

I welcome comments from Updike's other admirers. Stick to the poetry though.

About Me

I'm a scholar by profession who learned, too late, that the world really does not need another paltry book about Shakespeare. What else is there to say? Except, as another, much greater scholar once said, "Sir, my history will not be long: the life that is devoted to knowledge passes silently away and is very little diversified by events. To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. He wanders about the world without pomp or terror, and is neither known nor valued but by men like himself."
I was educated at Amherst College (1949-53) where I studied philosophy, mathematics, and literature, and at Harvard University where I earned a Ph.D in English Literature in 1964. I studied at Cambridge University on a Fulbright (1954-55), served in the U.S. Army (1955-57), taught (from 1962 to 1999, when I retired) at Wellesley College, Bemidji State University, Metropolitan State University, Hebei University (PRC). I have been married, happily, to Katherine Greene Lewis since 1960. We have four children.